Search

The Antidouchebaggitarian Manifesto

I realize I am neither Republican or Democrat. I am socially liberal but fiscally and governmentally conservative. This creates a problem. So I’m going to make my own political party.

Here is the Manifesto of the Antidouchebagitarian Party. I am still working on some of the language and finer points. Feel free to comment.

1) Don’t Be a Douchebag. This should be self-explanatory, but for the morons in the crowd we’ll spell it out: leave me the fuck alone. The government should only be involved in the lives of its citizens where specific issues affect the society and not the individual. In other words, unless you have a specific legal reason to be sticking your fucking schnoz into my diapers, get the fuck away.

1a) End Governmental Recognition of Marriage. The word “marriage” is not a secular term; it has deep religious connotations and the government isn’t in the business of managing people’s belief in a wizard in the sky (or lack thereof). The government should recognize “civil partnerships” and afford the rights of what we call “marriage” to those unions; those are legal partnerships. It shouldn’t care what those partnerships are for.

1b) Women Get to Choose to be Pregnant or Not. A crazy idea, I know, but we don’t live in the middle ages anymore. Terminating pregnancies is a very personal choice, and one that the government has no right talking about.

1c) Fuck Off With Criminalized Prostitution and Marijuana Use. The taxes we could get from the decriminalization of these two things alone would be gangbusters. Plus, we could regulate two industries which are high-crime (and, in the case of prostitution, possible health threats). This also reduces police and court work load.

2) Science Makes the World Better. Ever wonder why no one you know is crippled from polio? Science. Ever wonder why smallpox doesn’t kill hundreds of thousands every year? Science. Ever wonder why cancer isn’t a death sentence? Science. As a species, we have one biological advantage that allowed us to get out of the trees and stop eating a diet that consists only of bananas: our fuckin’ brains. Let’s use ’em.

2a) Fund Research. This isn’t just about medical research, but scientific research in general. Research brings in all sorts of happy stuff to our lives. We had no real practical reason to go to the moon but because of the research into that we got ball point pens and Tang. Practical science is secondary to research science; it’s a result, not a cause. Smart people understand that general research will always make a society stronger (which leads to bullet point 3).

3) Be Selfish and Greedy. Don’t take more of my money than you need. However, we are aware that when our whole society is stronger, we are stronger as individuals (since we are members of that society). So the laws of selfishness dictate that we want to enable the bulk of society to be productive, educatated, and protected. This may mean taking a lot of my money, but I also recognize I’ll get the value back in other ways.

3a) Universal Health Care is a Must Have. Why? Because if everyone has even basic wellness check-ups, we will reduce our vulnerability, as a society, to interesting things like, oh, epidemics and bacteriological terrorism. Why is this greedy and selfish? Because if you don’t get sick, you can’t infect me with your cooties, dumbass.

3b) Education Spending Should Be Paramount. Why? Because if the populace is smarter, we do smarter things as a group. That means not passing dumbass laws based on the ten commandments, for example, which makes life better for everyone. It’s selfish because a smarter populace ensures my job stability – which, in turn, ensures yours.

3c) Municipal Organization Spending Should Also Be High on the List. I’m talking cops and firemen and paramedics. We need to spend more money on the police force. I don’t mean throwing more cops at crime; I mean throwing more money to make better cops (also maybe more cops). A handful of smarter police and fire departments with modern equipment will go further than a mass of poorly trained thugs.

3d) Infrastructure Spending Should Also Be High on the List. Sitting in traffic sucks. It makes my life less fun. Let’s make my life more fun. This may require spending money. Bridges, roads, tunnels, trains, planes. Transportation is very important, but so also are things like clean water and power.

4) Lead Through Example and Not Fear. We should want to be our leaders, not fear them or the boogymen they purport to protect us from. This sort of ties into bullet point 1. Actually, it really ties into bullet point one. But I leave it as its own point because we shouldn’t be doing shit like torturing people or starting wars over oil.

4a) With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility. If some group in the Congo decides to start butchering another group in the Congo, and we can stop it, we should. Because we can do it, even if others can’t. We have a moral imperative to not let people get raped and butchered. This speaks to a global society. I’d like to say we should be isolationist but I can’t: we are a global power.

4b) All For One and One For All. Civitas Romanae. This sounds stupid to say under point 4, but here goes: Fucking with one of us is fucking with all of us. This should be our foreign policy. I’m not talking about legal mumbo jumbo; I’m saying that if some stupid crew of fundies in the world decides to declare war on a citizen of our fair society, that we should step up to the plate and lay down the hammer.

4c) Don’t be Obstructionist. We are for the people. The people may not often want what we think is best for them (something we can theoretically cure with better education). Be loud, be aggressive, be inflammatory, but ultimately bend to the will of society.

Comments (20)

I am intrigued by your ideas and wish to subscribe to your newsletter. Even if I do live in a medieval paste-eating state.

If you are willing, could you talk a little about what limits you would place on 3a, especially in light of 2a? When people bandy about the term “Universal Health Care”, what most of them envision is a world where all their health services are magically paid for. This might be a simple cost for taxpayers to bear when we’re talking clinic visits. This is not likely to be a simple cost to bear when we’re talking chronic disease management, end-of-life care, or heroic resuscitation. When the pot of resources are finite, who decides who gets what?

In the UK, we pay for the NHS with a flat 30% (ish) rate of tax on income taken at source, which rises to 50-60% for the highest bracket (millionaires) and a flat 15% sales tax on everything. its the largest single employer in the western hemisphere, and _everything_ with a statistically proven record of improving illness is approved _provided that illness is not better treated another way_.

Theres a prescription drug co-pay that varies according to a large set of criteria, but for most people works out to to around $20 for a months supply of anything. Social welfare covers individuals unable to work due to chronic illness or disability, giving them completely free access to medical resources. we have a more relaxed stance to the afailability of painkillers, due to it being cheaper to just sell you them over the counter than have the government foot the bill for a doctors appointment, then a pharmacy tech, then the pills.

what does this mean for me at a personal level? it means that when my grandfather broke his leg back in the 40s and it set wrong, that 60 years later when his doctor told him to fix it, three weeks later he’d seen specialists, talked to therapists, and went into surgery, planing away part of his knee, re-breaking and resetting the bone. he stayed a week or so in hospital, and was then visited daily by a nurse for about a month after that. end cost to him : Nothing. End cost to family : nothing. Insurance forms filed : None.

Obviously it didn’t cost him nothing — he’d paid for it over the years with a flat 30%(ish) income tax + a flat 15% sales tax.

Most of us in the US are required to pay into Social Security, which covers benefits for retirement, disability, and unemployment (among other things). Social Security was started in the 1930s, and is paid for by an 15.3% rate of tax on income taken at the source, and is collected and managed separately from other tax revenue. The program is projected to go bankrupt in 15-30 years, due primarily to longer lifespans which require a longer payout period. For people of my generation, paying into the system is a kind of joke, since we are unlikely to see any of the promised benefits. What would keep a health care program of grander scope and cost from spiraling out of control into insolvency in the same fashion? How are costs controlled in the UK?

costs are basically controlled in the UK by managing a smarter system; drugs that can be deregulated out of the hands of doctors and sold over the counter are; pain meds are the most obvious example. they run a nurse-manned NHS helpline where you p[hone them up and describe your symptoms over the phone, to cut down on expensive doctor visits and tests, effectively pre-screening “I cut my thumb” morons out of the chain. that, and we’re always looking towards preventative intervention; we’d rather treat a $4 boil on your foot that cut off your gangrenous leg 6 months down the line.

Of course, this doesnt cover all of it; additional revenue is culled from a compartively much harsher ‘sin tax’ system, where a pack of smokes in the UK is currently running around $9 per 20, along with a $8-9 equivalent tax on a 70cl bottle of spirits, and around $1 a pint for beer. late 2008, our fuel tax stood at around $3.50 per gallon for regular gas : which seems obscene by US standards, but then our entire country is smaller than a lot of your states, so the infrastructure demand for cheap gasoline is much smaller. at the same time, the government deregulates bars across the country, allowing for 24 hour opening hours. we tax you heavily, but we encourage you to spend your money in bars.

as for the long-term solvency of the plan, its kind of in doubt in the UK too, only not to such a sudden degree as the US, also, the long-standing institution of the NHS is so greatly intertwined with our economy that allowing it to go bust would be like allowing GE to go bankrupt when evrything it made and did was US-based, so Im fairly sure that a sizeable chunk of our basic inflation is allocated to the NHS payroll.

so basically : its paid for by higher sin taxes, its made cheaper by a smarter, more preventative system and finally it’ll carry on because it not carrying on would mean major economic disaster for the country as a whole.

Income tax in the UK isn’t flat: it’s both more and less progressive than you say. 20% for up to £37,400, 40% over that. And the first £6475 untaxed. Also, VAT isn’t a sales tax, precisely… But never mind. What you say about the greatness of the NHS is spot on.

I am of the same moderate social-left, fiscal-right attitude as yourself, and that is the reason why I am going to school to eventually work my way into politics. Even if it’s just on a local scale, I see no reason why such a political viewpoint/party wouldn’t work.

Pretty close to my own beliefs really. I prefer to call it the Game Theory / Fuck Off party: If Game Theory says that leaving it to the individual would end in a poor result, then bring in Government (aka. Market Failure). Otherwise, Fuck Right Off.

#5 : *Do not be afraid of great works*. The space program, whilst primarily producing little of real human value, enriches our lives, inspires scientists, and causes by its existence, the invention and distribution of technology that we might otherwise have not developed for many more years.

This also confuses me. The GDP is still there, as is the will to see heroic works. perhaps the imagination, or the willingness to be personally responsible for the cost, in an age where every anchorman equates a program they dislike into cop/teacher/doctor sized portions? Either way, it depresses me that we arent, for instance, turning arizona deserts into a state-sized solar panel.

Sorry that this sounds so hyperbolic, but space exploration has another important function– the preservation of our species. One thing we know for certain is that eventually Earth will become uninhabitable. Maybe that will be tomorrow when we have a NEW-q-ler war or maybe it won’t happen until the sun becomes a red dwarf in a couple billion years, but one way or another it will happen.

The ability to create self-sustaining, self-propagating colonies won’t come quickly. Big projects like that will require generations of work. If we don’t start until we need to, we’ll be fucked. We must start early.

Sounds good, but I have a problem with 1A – specifically that since we’re still trying to disentangle church and state, the church really is at the mercy of the government. I believe that the church lost the right to control marriage right around the time when it was decided that divine mandate was a good reason to have someone rule a country.

Marriage is not a religious institution, it is a service provided by the government to its citizens. People are able to get non-religious marriages, which further reinforces the point that religious involvement is entirely optional.

If people want representatives of the sky fairy to bless their marriages, that’s fine – but the fact that people traditionally have done so doesn’t mean that they get to own the institution.